A blog to catalog some minor grievances
in the products we all know and love.

Google: Search For What I Asked For

Google has adopted an annoying habit of changing what I have asked to search for with something similar but different to what I want. Perhaps this doesn't affect you, but for a software developer, it happens all too often.

Here's a recent example. I search Google for the phrase: "document insertImage" (without quotes). Google then goes and uses an algorithm of some kind to see what I really meant to search for. It determines that what I probably meant to search for was "document insert Image" (without quotes). Which is not what I wanted. Google explains this to me on the results page: "Here are the results for 'document insert Image' ... Search instead for 'document insertImage'", giving me the opportunity to correct their mistake.

But what I really want is for Google to search for what I asked for to begin with. Inevitably when this happens, I wind up scanning the list of the results and about half-way down the page I realize that none of these results are useful because Google didn't search for what I asked for.

I know Google does this to be helpful — a lot of people write searches with typos and this is Google's way of improving the search experience for most of their users. But for people like me that are pretty good at typing and need to search for programming phrases ("insertImage"), it just gets in the way. I would love a preference for disabling this feature altogether. I'd also settle for Google just doing the requested search and including a block at the top suggesting their alternative search if one is found relevant.